Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Is this the Ipocalypse?

Today, February 2, 2011, is the day the internet is projected to run out of IP addresses. For those of you who don't know, an IP adress is a unique number assigned to each device connected to the internet. It's kind of like a phone number for computers. The internet running out of IP addresses is like a phone company running out of phone numbers. In order to allow more phones into the system, you have to add digits to the phone numbers. The same thing goes for IP addresses, except it's a bit more complicated than just adding numbers. Adding extra digits to the IP address system will make the IP addresses incompatible with the original IP addresses. Nobody knows how this problem will be solved. For now, this problem only effects people receiving new internet devices. For everyone else, you can still use the internet like you normally do.

A graph showing the availability of IP addresses in the current IP system:

Watch the story here:

WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT?!?! Who knows? Who cares? At least we can still use the internet now, right?